07 January 2013

The Footnote tag

I wrote this post an age ago, but never posted it for some reason. Updated the math, and I'm just going to throw it out there now, lest it langour longer in the land of the lost.

The astute reader may have noticed that one of the most-commonly used tags on this blog so far is the footnote tag. There's an amusing story behind this - well, amusing to me, anyway.

So the wife has a blog. A fantastic, funny, witty, interesting blog. After she'd been blogging for a while, she made a comment to me that she felt like she was putting footnotes on every post. So I suggested that she make a 'footnote' tag, and tag every post that had a footnote in it, so that she could quickly see what percentage of her posts were afflicted with footy-notey goodness.

She then spent the better part of an evening going back through all of her posts and adding 'footnote' to the list of tags for all of her annotated posts. At the end of the day, that tag outstripped every other tag on her blog by a large margin. And by large, I mean "nearly double the next-most-oft-used tag". Even today, my quick napkin math shows that she has footnotes on 22.99% of her blog posts1. I give her occasional bouts of heck about it.

Well, then along comes this here bloggy-space. And in my first real post (the baby announcements had already been drafted for emails to friends/family/coworkers), I find myself all up on the footnotes like Axe body spray on desperate teen boys.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander, so I've taken a dose of my own medicine and mixed metaphors like a metaphor-mixing fool who graduated from Metaphor University with a degree in MetaMixology.

So yeah, probably not as interesting if you're not - y'know - me, but there you have it.